Hi, I am Marcel van Oosterwijk and I’m a Dutch IT consultant living and working in Sweden.
I’ve spent more than 30 years working with software testing, quality engineering, quality management and organizational improvement. Over time, my interests have increasingly shifted from fixing individual problems to understanding why those problems arise—and what organizations need to become capable of preventing them.
Much of my professional work has involved assessing how organizations develop and maintain their capabilities. I’m a co-author of TPI Next, a model for assessing and improving test processes, and I’ve continued developing assessment approaches and reference models throughout my career.
I’m particularly interested in the relationship between products, organizations and the knowledge needed to develop and maintain them. How do we know what an organization is actually capable of? Why do improvements so often fail to last? And how can we preserve the reasoning behind decisions so that future decisions can build on what we’ve learned?
Outside my professional work, I enjoy photography, technology and experimenting with software and hardware. One long-running project involves building a model railway that can solve and physically execute a shunting puzzle.
I use this blog to explore ideas, document experiments and occasionally revisit assumptions I’ve held for years. Some subjects come directly from my professional experience; others begin with curiosity about how something works.
The common thread is an interest in understanding things a little better.
You’ll find me in LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcelvanoosterwijk/